I’m a Starbucks fanboy and I don’t care who knows it. One of the reasons, besides their coffee, is that they are, in my experience, consistently one of the most customer friendly companies. I find this to be true across all industries (at least industries that I personally have contact with as a customer).

But I’ve been perplexed for a couple of years now at their distinctly unfriendly insistence on having fee-fi in their stores. And almost everyone with any kind of internet addiction need has been wondering the same thing.

All that changed today, as you probably already know.

S$ has finally (finally!) announced free-fi in its stores. But it’s not free-fi for everyone, and I think even this is a good thing.

According to the onlyposts I’ve read on the subject, you can only get wifi for free at starbucks if…

You have a S$ card (just a regular, free one that you pick up in the store)

You need to buy something with it

You limit your time to 2 hours/day*.

I see a lot of wisdom in this policy. First, it rewards S$ cardholders. Will it prompt people to get a free Starbucks card and load it up? Probably, and that’s also fine by me. It just means that everybody and their brother won’t be taking up bandwidth. I’m also down with the purchase requirement. I never go into a free-fi coffeehouse and use their signal without buying something. It’s just the right thing to do. I don’t mind if those places offer free wifi with no stated purchase requirement, but it’s probably smarter to make people buy something. Finally, the two hour thing. I have to read up a bit more on the details so I don’t know if another purchase on your card gets you an additional 2 hours, but it doesn’t matter. I think enough people are now going to find their way back to Starbucks from places like Panera that the 2 hour/day limitation might be a good thing.

This won’t make me a less loyal customer at either of my two local haunts: Churchill or Java’s Brewin’, but it will make me much more likely to forego Panera when I’m out of town. Their coffee sucks!

When you hear that name, no doubt you think of Chief Brody of the Amity Island Police and his almost single handed killing of two murderous eating machines in Jaws I and II.

The first image I get is the final scene of Sorcerer, my own favorite Scheider flick, about a group of exiles who transport nitro over treacherous terrain, both physical and psychological, in order to deliver it to the site of an oil fire.

Roy Scheiderpassed away Sunday at 75. While many of you might choose watch Jaws in his memory, I think I’ll try to find a copy of Sorcerer instead.